Our Vision
Message from the CEO
At O-I, our vision is to be the most innovative, sustainable, and chosen supplier of brand-building packaging solutions. While we believe glass packaging is already the most sustainable packaging solution, sustainability at O-I is about more than what we make. It is also about how we make it. It is about the interconnected ecosystem that involves our suppliers, our customers, our people, and the communities where we operate. It is about achieving balance between our operations and the products we make with the current and future needs of our communities, the planet, and our collective prosperity. At O-I, the journey to this balance—sustainability—is grounded in resilience, innovation, and the ever-present challenge to transform what we do.
As we strive for a more sustainable future for O-I, our stakeholders, and communities, we hope you will be inspired by what you learn in our sustainability report. We hope you will join us in trying to create sustainability for today and for generations to come.
Andres A. Lopez (He/Him)
Chief Executive Officer
Message from the CSO
Despite the challenges of the pandemic, we continued our transformative leadership in sustainable packaging in 2020 and 2021.
Coming out of 2019—when we were the first packaging company to issue a green bond—in February 2020, we became the first glass packaging company to receive approval from the Science-Based Targets initiative for our emissions reduction goal. We also began an active glass advocacy campaign to re-balance the dialogue on the sustainability of glass-packaging and increased our support for glass recycling and reuse initiatives. Our work also included establishing a global sustainability network, expanding our sustainability initiatives, and doubling the total number of goals under these sustainability initiatives. Most importantly, we started up our manufacturing line in Holzminden, Germany that uses tomorrow’s glass-melting technology—O-I’s breakthrough and proprietary MAGMA technology.
New and improved for 2021, our sustainability report showcases all of this work and more. We provide a broad view of our sustainability journey, including where we have been, where we are, and where we intend to go. The report touches on many aspects of our business and provides a holistic view of how O-I and glass packaging will play a key role in the sustainable future we all seek.
We are excited about sustainability at O-I and our future. We hope you find this report informative and inspiring.
Randolph L. Burns (He/Him)
Chief Sustainability Officer
Vision Statement
The essence of a sustainable organization is a quest for balance among its process and what it produces and the needs of people, organizations, the planet, and our collective prosperity. The aspiration represented by such a balance depends on creating an organization designed for the long term—one that finds strength, resiliency, and coexistence precisely because it constantly seeks and finds this balance. Even though the roadmap to achieve this balance may change with time or circumstances, the path to sustainability always involves vision, innovation, and transformation.
For more than 100 years—through pandemics, two world wars, Prohibition, the Great Depression, the 1970s Energy Crisis, and countless economic and social upheavals—O-I has been here to invent, design, produce, and transform packaging solutions to meet the needs of generations of consumers.
Our sustainability ambition for today and tomorrow are grounded in the same resiliency created by our foundational commitment to innovation and transformation of our processes, products, and relationships with our stakeholders. While reducing, reusing, and recycling are necessary steps, they alone are not sufficient to achieve the sustainability ambitions of the global community—or those of O-I.
This is why O-I is reimagining and reinventing the business model for glass packaging. We see a future where the innate circularity of glass meets O-I’s disruptive MAGMA melting technology and other innovations to change how glass is made and sold. This sustainable future of glass involves not just the use of cleaner gas-oxygen fuels and improved hybrid technology in traditional furnaces, but also O-I’s revolutionary MAGMA melting technology capable of using less refined recycled glass, biofuels, and other carbon-neutral renewable sources of energy. It includes a manufacturing process that has on-off technology to optimize the use of energy and efficiency. One that can be co-located at manufacturing and filling facilities, reducing logistics impact, and capitalizing on the potential to use and reuse waste heat, water, and other resources. One that can produce breakthrough lightweight containers and capitalize on O-I’s decorating technology.
O-I’s vision and journey for this sustainable future is not a blue-sky vision. It is here today. With the start up in February of 2021 of our full-scale MAGMA line in our Holzminden, Germany plant, O-I is one step closer to bringing this vision to life.
The governance and sustainability infrastructure we have built, and continue to improve, is the foundation of our ambitions. In 2020, we introduced structural enhancements to deepen and accelerate our progress. We enhanced our governance by giving sustainability and ESG oversight to our Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee. We appointed a Chief Sustainability Officer, created a global and executive sustainability advisory committee, created a global executive diversity and inclusion council, and created a sustainability leadership network in every country group.
To ensure our efforts address issues material to O-I, our stakeholders, and align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals that are more relevant to our business, we elevated and expanded our ambitions to focus on nine areas: People, Supply Chain, Engineering and R&D, Raw Materials, Energy, Water, Waste, Emissions, and Social Engagement. We also doubled the total number of our ambitious and aspirational global goals inside these nine areas from five to 10. We summarize our strategy to bring this vision to life in one sentence: we will achieve balance, together, by transforming what we do.
The sustainability balance we seek requires integrated cooperation among stakeholders around shared goals and collaborative changes in what we do and how we do it. Our strategy toward progress continues to focus on translating our global goals into actionable local objectives and then partnering with customers, suppliers, and communities to achieve our overlapping objectives.
Our approach has produced a number of sustainability and ESG firsts, including the first glass packaging maker to have an approved Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) emissions reduction target, issue a green bond, achieve platinum status for material health from Cradle to Cradle certification, and establish a dedicated R&D innovation center to improve and reinvent glass melting technology.
Our progress includes forward momentum of our processes and products. We continue to add more state-of-the-art gas-oxygen furnaces to our furnace footprint. Two of our innovative factories reduce carbon intensity and increase energy efficiency by shifting waste heat to community use. In 2020, 30% of our furnaces averaged 50% recycled glass usage, which lowers our overall carbon emissions. Our factories continue to receive recognitions, including a NAMA Gold recognition for our Zipaquira, Colombia plant and an energy-demand-management recognition for our Waco, Texas factory. We have introduced innovative new container designs. Our glass advocacy campaign and outreach on recycling continue to re-balance the dialogue on the sustainability of glass packaging.
Guided by our vision and our values, we continue to be committed to our culture and our passionate people. We were named to Forbes Best Large Employer list. We became a signatory to the CEO Action pledge to support Diversity and Inclusion. Our Corporate Equality Index score increased. We created and implemented several programs focused on employee safety, including our “Golden Rules” initiative and recently our O-I CARES program, which stands for Collective Active Role For Employee Safety. We are proud that our safety initiatives helped reduce our Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR) by 30% in 2020.
The strong commitment we have for community support and engagement remained a key part of our drive for sustainability balance. Our 80-year-old charitable foundation continued to support grants, matching employee gifts, and donations to causes supporting the environment, the arts, and community well-being—including funds to support COVID-19 vaccine awareness efforts. We maintained our longstanding social partnerships with organizations like United Way. We also discovered new ways to engage and advocate for social justice, like partnering with one of our beer customers to support their “Black is Beautiful” campaign to help fight racial inequality. O-I will continue our efforts to balance our operations with people, planet, and our collective prosperity.
Together with our stakeholders, O-I is committed to realizing our vision of being the most sustainable maker of rigid packaging.